Pretty Little Liars

Sara Shepard's sixteen novels were well underway when the show arrived, and the adaptation drew on the whole run, from the first book through Flawless, Perfect, Unbelievable and Wanted, before charting its own course. Reading them means discovering a mystery you only think you know, because the answer to who A is has nothing in common with what the show revealed. The books are also sharper and meaner than the show. Their Liars are not wronged innocents but girls capable of real cruelty and genuinely dangerous choices, and Shepard stays inside their heads as guilt and self-interest compete. Characters the show kept around for years meet very different fates here, and romances that ran for seasons on screen are fleeting or absent, which keeps the focus on the secrets and the menace rather than the pairings. For viewers who enjoyed the twists but wanted the stakes to cost more, the novels deliver a darker, stranger version of Rosewood with a twin-swap solution the show never touched.

Alison herself turns out to be A in the books. After Mona, the real Alison is revealed as the tormentor: she had swapped places with a secret twin, Courtney, and killed her. The show has no Courtney. It builds its own chain of reveals instead, first CeCe Drake, also known as Charlotte, who is Alison's adoptive sister and cousin, and finally Alex Drake, a secret twin of Spencer's. Both were created for television, so the books' solution is entirely different. The cast of survivors is reshuffled. Mona lives on screen, but in the books she dies when Spencer accidentally pushes her off a cliff at Floating Man's Quarry during a fight. Toby takes his own life early in the novels, while the show keeps him alive as Spencer's long-term love interest. Jenna is murdered in the books but lives in the show, and Maya dies on screen but survives on the page. The romances are largely television inventions or expansions. Aria and Ezra's affair is brief in the books: A exposes it, Ezra is arrested and fired, and he leaves town. The show makes him a main character with a past connection to Alison and a secret book project about the Liars, and he eventually marries Aria. Caleb Rivers does not exist in the novels, where Hanna's love interest is Mike, and the two marry as teenagers. The show's Alison marries Emily and has children with her, whereas the book Alison has no romantic interest in Emily and wants her dead. The timeline is compressed. Ali vanishes at the end of seventh grade in the books and is gone for about three years before her body is found and the messages start, rather than the show's single year. Hanna's home life is reversed: her mother leaves for a job in Singapore and Hanna moves in with her father, unlike the close mother and daughter on screen. Emily and Mona are white in the books, and Wren is half Korean rather than British. Courtney, Nick Maxwell, Kelsey, Tabitha and Iris are left out altogether. The Liars are also gentler on television. In the books they frame people for drug possession, flee the scene of a car accident and push people off cliffs and balconies, including Aria shoving Tabitha off a Jamaican hotel roof, which never happens in the show.